Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Predators tell children how to kill themselves - Church of Euthanasia

By Alex SchadenbergExecutive Director - Euthanasia Prevention CoalitionI was cleaning up my old email and I found this article from February 2008, that explains how certain elements within the right to die movement are preying on vulnerable teenagers and others to provide them a "service" of suicide information.
The article was reporting on the new suicide threat that has been posed by suicide promoting websites. The article explains:

A network of "suicide gurus" who use the internet to advise people how to kill themselves has been exposed.

They are blamed for prompting depressed and vulnerable youngsters to take their own lives.

Campaigners have uncovered 29 "internet suicides" in Britain since 2001, including two new cases reported this weekend.

The article then examines how these suicide promoting websites operate:

Among the most notorious suicide websites ... are two discussion forums, or "chatrooms", in which users offer advice on how to end one's life.

In some cases, people with suicidal feelings have been encouraged to take their own lives rather than to seek professional advice.

In a posting on one of the sites last week, a desperate user wanting to know how hang himself was directed, by another correspondent, to a website containing drawings of knots and nooses.

The article then uncovers an American group called the Church of Euthanasia:

One of the most notorious figures on the internet suicide scene is Nagasvia Yronwode, a self-confessed satanist who runs a shop selling occult books and charms in the small California town of Forestville, north of San Francisco.

Yronwode, 46, describes himself as the "outreach director" for an extremist cult called the Church of Euthanasia, which advocates suicide as a means of saving the world from the effects of overpopulation.

The work of Nagasvia Yronwode is then uncovered:

Writing under the name Boboroshi, he has edited a suicide guide, which details various methods.

Yronwode/Boboroshi told the Telegraph: "The guide is there to make it easier for people who opt for suicide to carry it out. The purpose of my information is empowerment for competent human beings who have an interest in ending their lives.

"I haven't seen any evidence that any person has acted as a result of reading the guide. But, of course, people who have an interest in ending their lives may well seek out information that relates to suicide and in somes cases that leads them to end their lives." he stated

The article concludes with a telling statement by Yronwode:

"I'm not the protector of these troubled youths. Their parents are the people who made them troubled. They are responsible for them. They should look at their living conditions, genetic features and local conditions which might lead them to take their own lives. Everything else is a distraction."